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The partner spotlight is a weekly series where we go behind the scenes with some of the companies that make VendorDB great. Next up is The Herbert Brothers!

The Vitals

Name: The Herbert Brothers
Location: Batesville, Indiana
Year Founded: 2004
Specialties: We specialize in using humor and creativity to engage target audiences with entertaining advertising they want to see and share.

What inspired you to start your company?

We grew up using our imaginations and creativity in everything we did from making things to telling stories. We love entertainment. We love movies. We love great advertising that does more than just talk about a product or service but tells a fun story. We brothers are also very competitive and we inspire one another. And we absolute love to create.

How is it working together as a family?

There are five of us Herbert Brothers. And we’re not just brothers – we’re also best friends. And we each have our own individual experiences and strengths. From oldest to youngest: Joe has a background in art and design as well as computer programming; Dave is a wizard with numbers, has an economics degree and has experience managing companies; Matt was an animator for The Simpsons; Josh served in the US Army’s Special Operations Command, and was deployed twice to Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom; and Pete has a degree in writing, specializing in comedic writing. We are all self-taught in the art of filmmaking and directing and have been successful in making that a career together.

Why Indiana?

While many of the brothers have spent time living in other areas, including LA, we grew up in Southeast Indiana. We love the midwest, and we love small towns. If feels like home, and we’re proud to make that our central location for operations. In addition, before starting a career in filmmaking, Joe Herbert was a partner in a website design firm in Southeast Indiana with several hundred clients in the region, and those great business relationships give the Herbert Brothers access to a variety of interesting locations to shoot commercials from restaurants, banks, and funeral homes to churches, libraries, schools, office buildings and more.

What was the first job someone hired you for?

When we first decided to get into filmmaking we knew a local company that had a product they were trying to get into mass market. We didn’t have any equipment, but we had a friend in college who access to check out some equipment from the university, and we created some product demo reels this company could use in selling their products.

What was the most technically challenging work you’ve created?

Our most technically challenging work to date has been a video we did for mercola.com. It was almost a four minute long commercial – essentially a branded short film based on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – that involved a massive set that was built entirely by our father (with some help from us) which included an interior of a schoolhouse, and a large exterior with a yellow brick road. The shoot also required a great deal of custom costumes, specialty makeup, and a lot of children as actors. We also shot the entire exterior with a blue screen backdrop which then required some massive and beautiful motion tracked computer generated graphics, and special effects.

￼Which work or brand are you best known for?

We are most known for winning the Doritos Crash The Super Bowl Ad contest when our commercial, Free Doritos, aired during the Super Bowl and was ranked the #1 Super Bowl commercial of 2009. We won a million dollars from Doritos and went on a whirlwind of media interviews including being guests on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

Which project is your most underrated?

We made a couple Pepsi Max commercials that Pepsi decided not to air during the Super Bowl, and we believe those spots very likely would have been just as successful for Pepsi as our Doritos commercial was for Frito Lay.

Who is the most interesting brother?

If you ask any of the brothers who the most interest person is (or who the best looking is, or who the smartest brother is, etc.), the answer will be unanimous, as everyone’s response would of course be, “me.”

￼What emerging tech trend will have the biggest impact on your business?

Emerging technology has and will continue to be a big impact on our business – in a positive way. Because the technology, equipment, and software for making quality digital video continues to improve and become more and more affordable the power to create great filmmaking is put into the hands and minds of those who are most creative in their thinking, and not just to those with the deepest pockets.

What is your biggest challenge at the moment?

Our biggest challenge is finding the right creative partners (agency or client) that truly want to collaborate and build a trusting long lasting relationship. The best entertainment and comedy is the result of talented people trusted and empowered to do what they do best.

What do you make of the trend where brands are skipping their agency of record to work directly with production partners?

This is partly because, as mentioned earlier, technology, equipment, and software for creating video content is becoming increasingly better and far more affordable than ever before which puts the power into the hands who can use it the best, and into the minds of those who are extremely creative thinkers. Take our company for example. For ten years straight Anheuser-Busch took the coveted top spot in the Super Bowl, until Doritos finally did it with our commercial in 2009. We wrote, produced, directed and editing that spot, and we had a much smaller budget than any other spot in the Super Bowl. We love working with agencies, but we fill a very important cost effective, nimble, and creative space that many clients are hungry for. That said, we love and admire the work of ad agencies. They inspire us to improve. We look up to them like role models. We’d also love to create another Super Bowl commercial (not as part of a contest), and defend our title in that arena.

What is the best thing about working for yourselves?

Herbert Brothers Entertainment is the best company in the world, because we’re family and we’re the bosses. We have a lot of fun doing what we do, but we work very hard and put in a lot of hours. And when you work that hard and for that long… you better love what you do and who you do it with. And we do, greatly.

Where is the best bar in Batesville?

We have a reputation for our fondness for milk. Any bar that serves white and or chocolate milk is our favorite. And for those who don’t know us, it’s a great conversation starter when we walk into a bar and all start drinking milks.

Any wild company party stories?

Most are surprised to learn we’re not the wild party types. We enjoy going to things like sporting events, doing something competitive, or just hanging out or playing games. At parties we tend to just relax and enjoy life, each other, and good conversation.

Which industry boondoggle is most likely to send your employees to rehab: Cannes, AICP or SXSW?

Hold on, I need to google what a boondoggle is….

Care to share a joke?

Results from the world’s largest study of humor, by Dr. Richard Wiseman a few years back are very interesting to us. Jokes with an average of 101 words tended to be the funniest. Of all jokes involving animals, jokes with ducks tended to be funniest. It’s interesting how different cultures view humor. American’s love idiots and in particular they love when something unfortunate happens to someone else (partly why we designed our Doritos Super Bowl commercial the way we did), while some other countries prefer word play. I find this quite amazing, the following joke (a dumb one in my opinion) was the number one ranked joke in two different European countries. “Why do ducks have webbed feet? To stamp out fires. Why do elephants have flat feet? To stamp out burning ducks” Somehow, out of thousands of jokes, that one ranked number one in two countries.

Here is was the number one joke ranked by Americans: “Two guys are hunting in the woods, when one of them suddenly drops over dead. The other frantically calls 911. The operator answers, and the man says, “Help Help My friend… he just dropped over dead.” The operator calmly responds, “Ok, I can help. First, I want you to make sure he’s dead.” There is a slight pause, while the operator waits. Then she hears a gun shot. The man gets back on the phone and says, “OK, now what?”

What does the future look like for the Brothers?

We just finished shooting season one of a reality tv show that follows us behind the scenes making entertaining commercials, and we look forward to finding out when that will be airing on television. This summer we’re making our directorial debut on a feature film that we’re hired to direct. The movie is a comedy, and will be shot on location in Florida. A great place to be during the winter months, so the future looks fantastic.

Music and sound design for advertising is the bulk of our business. On that side, we’re fortunate to have a very wide client base, from big agencies like Ogilvy and CP+B down to smaller shops all over the country. Outside of the ad world, what we’re probably most widely known for is the other side of our business: Film and television. Specifically human-interest documentaries (including Academy Award winner “Saving Face”) and sport/adventure films for guys like Warren Miller Films, Teton Gravity Research, National Geographic, Red Bull Media House, etc.

Why Boulder?

Most of our work is for clients outside of Colorado. So we could be just about anywhere. Everyone on our staff came here from somewhere else, and we all came to Boulder for the quality of life. 300+ days of sunshine a year, the splendor of the Rocky Mountains…

Little did we imagine when we started this thing 30-some years ago that Boulder would eventually become the hotbed of creative commerce that it is today. Crispin moving to town is what put our little town on the agency map, and since then it’s become an absolute magnet, sucking in talent from all over the place. It’s also great for out of town clients who want to come join us in person – they can toil away in the studios with us all week, and then spend a day or two skiing or just smoking copious amounts of legal weed before heading back to the real world.

How has the business changed since you started?

We’ve seen a trend over just the past few years where fewer and fewer clients want to create a piece of music from scratch. We still have plenty of requests for people wanting to come in and work with a composer face-to-face, but these days we’ll often just get a quick creative brief with a reference track, along with a question: “Do you guys have anything existing that could work like this? Oh, and we need it today.”

As this kind of request came up more and more, we quickly realized that there was a big opportunity here, and a handful of old B-sides and other unused compositions that never made it on air was not going to be nearly good enough.

So, this year we began composing for projects that didn’t yet exist. We focused at first on the most common genre requests: New folk, dubstep, indie anthem, etc. The response from agencies was immediate and absolutely overwhelming. We brought on more composers. We added some of the best and most relevant indie bands. The result was The Coupe Collective. It’s a very carefully curated collection of licensable music that has filled the niche between needledrop library music and original scoring perfectly. It’s more cost-effective than custom music, but it’s all customizable. We have all the master recordings so if the client loves the track but hates the electric guitar part, we can pull that right out. Replace it with an accordion. Get the singer back into the studio and change the lyrics. Make a breakbeat version. Just about anything’s possible with any song in the Collective.

What is your biggest challenge at the moment?

For us, it’s managing growth. Knowing when the right time is to build a sixth studio, or bring in more full time engineers. It’s a great problem to have, obviously, but that doesn’t make the decisions any easier.

What is the best thing about working at Coupe?

Everyone who works here is pretty much here for life. No one bitches about working late, or coming in on the weekend. We’re all acutely aware that we are really, really lucky to get to do something we love for a living. We’re truly a family, and we all share in the business’ profits – from the most junior assistant engineer on up – everybody is a profit participant.

What’s the best bar in Boulder?

It’s debatable. But I’m going with our patio on a Friday afternoon. Next to the creek with million dollar views of the Continental Divide, and an outrageously diverse crowd. We record bands at night, so near the end of day on a Friday we get this great intermingling where agency creatives and film makers are hanging out with rock stars. Making those connections (and often brokering deals between those worlds) is one of our favorite parts about what we do.

The Straight and Narrow – Sound design, Foley and a 5.1 mix for this short thriller.

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The partner spotlight is a weekly series where we go behind the scenes with some of the companies that make VendorDB great. Next up is New Object!

How did the partners meet?

We met at Crispin Porter and Bogusky in 2004, back in the crazy days of getting work done even if it meant sacrificing our health and well-being. There was so much focus on creating great work that countless hours at the office seemed completely justified. After we left Miami and freelanced for a few years, we met back up in New York, and after realizing that it was time to “get serious or whatever” we formed the company.

Why New York City?

We like it here. And Chelsea, where our office is, has a lot of solid lunch options. We appreciate the value of a good in-person chat, and having an office here affords us the ability to collaborate closely with clients without the travel expenses.

What was the most technically challenging work you’ve created?

The work we did with The Barbarian Group for Samsung’s CenterStage was probably the most technically challenging. There have also been a number of prototyping projects that we’ve done that have had very quick turnarounds that we’ve been very proud of, but of course we can’t show you any of them because they’re under NDA. You’ll just have to take our word for it 🙂

Which work or brand are you best known for?

Earlier this year we did a site for the rock band, J. Roddy Walston & The Business called Same Days Forever. It featured a stellar music video produced by our friends at The Martin Agency. It recently won an FWA Site Of The Day Award.

What advice do you have for agency producers or creatives?

Every production shop will probably tell you the same thing: Get us involved earlier in the process. We’ve done so many projects using so many different technologies, and we’ve solved so many problems that we’ve become pros at helping agencies catch issues in pre-production before they cause major headaches in development.

What emerging tech trend will have the biggest impact on your business?

The latest trend of wearing Google Glass under an Oculus Rift while listening to U2 on an Apple Watch has us stoked about the future of tech.

What do you make of the trend where brands are skipping their agency of record to work directly with production partners?

We’d love the opportunity to work directly with more high profile brands. Hormel Chili, if you’re reading this, let’s talk.

What is the best thing about working at New Object?

Working for ourselves. We have total freedom to dictate where we want to go and what we want to do as a company, and how we want to end this sentence… and that rules.

What does the future look like for New Object?

We can’t wait until we’ve been around so long that our name is slightly ironic. We actually take this seriously and work hard to keep finding new and interesting things to get into. We love smart interactive things; we love combining seemingly disparate technologies; we love fast-paced prototyping. So for us the future is pretty limitless. We’ve recently found ourselves getting more and more into installation-style work, which brings with it new opportunities and new challenges.

Care to share a joke?

Why do programmers always mix up Halloween and Christmas? Because Oct 31 == Dec 25. For more good jokes like this one, visit our website at www.newobject.com/jokes.html

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Want to know if your profile page is worth the $0.00 you’re spending on it?

Just like Facebook, LinkedIn and the other big platforms, we believe that you should see exactly how you benefit from maintaining a profile on VendorDB. And to us, that doesn’t mean vague statistics such as how many visitors the site sees overall or how many countries users come from. What’s truly valuable to your business is the activity on your company’s profile.

So today we’re rolling out profile metrics to all page managers.

Profile metrics offer a snapshot of your profile’s activity. We’re launching with insights into daily page traffic over the previous 90 days as well as recent visitors (locations and companies), and we’ll be adding additional data such as page interactions in the comings months.

For those wondering about the tech side of things, we’ve built this using a combination of Google Analytics data and our own proprietary tracking built on the Keen IO API. You can read more on how to make use of the Google Analytic’s API using Python over on Chris’ blog.

So if you haven’t already claimed your profile, do so today, there’s really no reason not to (it is FREE after all).